Asylum seeker sonnet

Within our happy harbourside retreatwe put on show of affluence and gleeand round the barbie with our friends we meetor watch the footy final on TV.

Our leaders stop the boats, turn back the tideof those who seek to storm our golden gates,to let them know that God's not on their sidenor will we ever count them as our mates.

With every boat that sinks our grief's untold,the smugglers just don't care they're overfull,so join the queue, no need to bribe with goldand get a proper visa in Kabul

or if we must, illegals to preventwe'll just excise the whole damn continent.

Brendan Doyle

small and smaller islands

beaches, these doors swung widethrough barbed-wire cliffs, gatesheld wide by a welcoming smileof sand; land a place for landing andthe landed, greeting and the waving,new bricks farmed and growthembraced like fresh children;______across the valley therea tragedy of cliffs, no garden clingingby its fingers, no symbiosis blendingin the soil; standing straight-backed,staring out to sea.

Ben Walter

Blind tiger

They repatriated this security risk.You'll besafe back home,they assured him, the war's over.

He knew about the war,forced to fight when still a child.And he knew about over.

Over was why he risked deathto escape to a placethat sounded so safe and festive:

Christmas Island. Only he was flownto another island where menhung from beams like strange fruit.

Now he sits on a footpathbegging for coins, his eyespunched out by bicycle spokes.

You'll besafe there, they growled,the war'sover. He knowswhat it means to be blind.

Rob Wallis

Brendan Doyle grew up in a house without books, and now wants to build a house of poetry. He has published poems in Islet, Five Bells, Get Reading Postcards, Famous Reporter and Four W.

Ben Walter is a Tasmanian writer and poet. His work has appeared in Island, Griffith Review, Cordite and Overland, and his debutpoetry manuscript, Lurching, was recently shortlisted for theUniversity of Tasmania prize, as part of the Tasmanian Literary Prizes.

RobWallis has published three volumes of poetry, the last, Man In A Glass Suit, in 2011. His poems have been published in Woorilla, The Mozzie, Poetry Monash, Wet Ink, Blue Dog and Westerly.He has won first and second prize in the FAW John Shaw Neilson PoetryAward, the Martin Downey Award for Urban Realism in the MPU International PoetryCompetition, and the Castlemaine PoetryPrize.

Existing comments

Thank you for these timely, strong pieces. When policies deliberately punish and wound, when leaders fail to lead, we must look to artists and writers to revive what's left of our national conscience. These poems point us to the hell 'we' are inflicting on innocents. They remind us that Australians, as represented by those we elect, are lousy Samaritans.Barry G | 28 May 2013

Terrific pieces that also convey a sense of betrayal, of the victims but also of our values. I also like the way you each use the title to sum up the poem but also convey an idea in its own right. Blind tiger, I assume, hints that the subject is Tamil but also, very subtly, that the LTTE suffered a certain blindness too.Pat Walsh | 28 May 2013

As I read the poetry, I was thinking about last Friday here in Kabul when I heard the explosion of a car bomb and then a suicide bomb followed by hours of gun fire as the remaining attackers were fought and eventually killed. Same thing happened in another city to the north at the same time and, again, a week earlier in Kabul.
Each time I hear these haunting sounds I wonder who and how many are dead this time?
Staff of the Australian Embassy here live behind their compound walls and wire and are rarely allowed to venture out.
But "it's safe" their colleagues in Oz say .....Anthony P | 28 May 2013

Why is it that it's alright for our government officials to commit murder? For every refugee killed because we sent them back, someone over here needs to serve a lengthy jail sentence. Then maybe we wouldn't be so keen to wash our hands of them.Bernadette | 29 May 2013

Similar Articles

Boys using violence to impress girls

Tim Kroenert

30 May 2013

Some lessons need to be learned more than once. A young boy punches an older peer in defence of the honour of a girl he admires. The girl is so impressed that she invites the boy on a date. Is violence, then, an approved medium for the defence of romantic ideals? The boy tests this premise twice more, with less gratifying results.

Life beyond IVF purgatory

Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk

31 May 2013

It wasn't so much a phone call as a lifeline — the day the fertility clinic called me with news of my pregnancy. After six years of hoping, the life my husband and I had all but given up on was to be ours. At that same time, radio host Sheridan Voysey and his wife Merryn were facing a more heartbreaking outcome.

Donate

Eureka Street is completely free of charge - however it costs a significant amount of money to provide our unique content.
Eureka Street relies almost entirely on dontions from our readers and organisations that support our endeavours.
The balance of our revenue is from advertisers.

If you are a regular reader and are able to support us financially, please consider making a donation.